Development and field testing of a multi-antenna GPS system for deformation monitoring

GPS has become an important technology for monitoring deformations of structures and the crust of the Earth. A limiting factor for large-scale use of GPS in such applications is however its high hardware cost. For automatic monitoring of deformations, each point to be monitored needs equipped with a set of GPS instruments. This makes many applications such as routine monitoring of landslides too expensive in most cases. A multi-antenna GPS system has been developed and tested aiming at significantly reducing the cost of GPS when used for monitoring deformations of objects such as slopes. The system uses special hardware and software to allow one GPS receiver to be used with a number of GPS antennas. One set of such equipment can therefore be used to monitor a number of points. The system normally reduces the cost of GPS hardware by a number of folds. Besides, such a system design also eases the tasks of data communication, management and system control. This paper describes the design and system configurations of the multi-antenna GPS system that has been developed by the research team. The system consists of integrated hardware and software components for data acquisition, transmission, processing, analysis and visualization. Integration of the GPS system with conventional slope monitoring systems will also be discussed in brief.